It's actually impressive how dull this game is. The characters are all very bland and generic anime archetypes, the story is extremely predictable (evil church, magic stones, you can probably guess the rest), and the gameplay is downright boring. The combat has very few options so you end up just walking forward and attacking things all the time and the characters have essentially no customization to them.

The nicest thing I can say about this game is that there are some cute character designs but honestly games with cute character designs are a dime a dozen so that's barely even something in this game's favor when everything else about it is so weak.

(I only played a handful of hours, so, y'know, grain of salt for all the rest of this)

While I think there's a lot of interesting lore in the background here, the game itself wasn't doing much to actually keep me interested in what was going on. The characters weren't particularly endearing, the factions weren't interesting or fun to be around, and the bit of the setting I saw didn't do much for me either.

I also had this problem where it felt like the game was expecting me to have fully read the in-game encyclopedia. I'd have conversations and things would be referenced in a way that they weren't directly explained but in most games I'd be able to figure out what's going on via context clues but Tyranny didn't seem to do that nearly as often as it should. And while playing a CRPG is agreeing to a certain amount of reading massive blocks of text, making me feel like I needed to read reams of text before I could really do anything felt like too bit an ask.

Also, as far as I got, this game's idea of 'evil' seems very... boring. This game is supposed to be about being evil and yet seemingly every choice the game asked me to make was "will you kill this group of people or enslave them?" and after the twelfth time of making that exact choice it just gets boring. There is such a wide swathe of opportunity for what 'evil' can be, especially in a fantasy setting, and yet this game seems to be very stuck on this one specific idea of being evil.

Nothing I encountered was very compelling and the mechanics of the game didn't seem to be doing anything interesting enough to keep me engaged on that front either. Maybe I'll give this another shot some day but it seems pretty unlikely.

I was in the mood to play a CRPG and looked at all the well-known classics and modern hits of the genre that I have yet to play... Disco Elysium, Pillars of Eternity, Planescape: Torment, Tyranny.... the list goes on. And then I installed Geneforge: Mutagen instead - I game I knew nothing about and no one I know had ever played it either. And hey guess what. It isn't very good. The pitch of being a summoner-type guy who can alter the genes or whatever of the creatures you summon is such a cool pitch but then it's an extremely basic system of "spend 2 extra points to boost their strength and 2 extra points to give them an aoe attack" type shit. Wildly underwhelming! And the writing here is so so so so so basic. You wash up on the shore of an abandoned island that is full of "Serviles" (aka humanoid creatures summoned by The Shapers to serve as slaves) and there's three factions and you have to pick one to ally with to get yourself off the island. Will you join the ones who want to peacefully be equals with the Shapers, the ones who want to destroy the shapers, or the ones who just really really like being slaves. I only got a couple hours in but absolutely nothing of what I saw made me think this is worth trudging through the forty hours of playtime to see this thing through so I'm just gonna quit before I get too invested in some dumb shit and go play a Good video game instead.

It's very funny to me that when you create your character the game says "okay you can play as the cool summoner who has the gimmick that the entire game is built around or you can play as a knight or a rogue, if you wanna, I guess." Who is doing that. Who is looking at the game about summoning critters and saying "no thank you, I would like to hit things with a sword instead"

The story is forgettable and wrapped up much faster than I thought it would. The main character is, at best, fine but he's so inconsistent in tone and behavior that it's hard to really latch on to him.

The puzzles are okay, I suppose. They're mostly nothing to write home about except for the ones that are on strict timers but you'd only want to write home about how terrible and frustrating it is to have to die several times just to be able to see what your options to solve the puzzle even are. In the last hour or so the puzzles are replaced by minigames which weren't as bad as I thought they would be but they certainly weren't any good, either.

Also, I thought Christianity was supposed to be all about kindness and forgiveness or whatever but this game sure does have a grudge with sex workers and homeless people and drug users and several other marginalized groups. There is this quiet cruelty to the game where the man sent to supposedly save humanity ends up killing, maiming, and generally terrorizing an awful lot of the people he's supposed to save.

I cannot possibly recommend anyone actually play this game but I would recommend looking up the soundtrack because it legitimately slaps.

Watch_Dogs 2 is a pretty clear step up over the first game in every possible way. It feels better to play, the world is more interesting, much of the excessive fluff got trimmed out, and (most importantly) the characters are actually likable now! Marcus, Sitara, Wrench, Josh, and Horatio are all great characters that were a ton of fun every time they got to have some dialogue together.

The main story did have some issues in that it felt like disjointed series of short stories with little to no impact on one another. In addition to that, the antagonist feels like he only matters in a conceptual way rather than any him be any actual threat. This all made the story a little tough to feel motivated to complete and resulted in the ending feeling a bit flat.

My final issue is that the politics of this game are in a weird place. The game paints itself as very rebellious and anti-establishment and while it mostly is that, it doesn't seem to want to go all the way with it. For example, there's a mission where you find out that some cops are using data they get from ctOS to do illegal stuff with a gang. It'd be a great time for the game to go on about police abolition or about the ways in which police don't actually serve the people but instead it goes into a bland "we need to get rid of the Bad Cops so that the Good Cops can be in power instead" and it makes it fall flat. The whole game ends up feeling like it wants to be perceived as progressive and very far left when it really isn't.

But overall, it is an enjoyable thirty-ish hours. Not my favorite of Ubisoft's open world games but a very solid one.

It's really important for a tactics game to give you as much information as you need to be able to make informed decisions. If you don't have enough information then you're just guessing and it becomes hard to do anything tactically. Unfortunately, Ragnarok: Tactics hides or obfuscates too much information to be much fun to play. Too much of the combat felt like I was hoping for the best and finding out that, no, what I was hoping for wasn't going to happen because of information the game just didn't feel like giving to me. It makes combat very frustrating and when the first few hours of story weren't doing anything for me, it made me ask: Why bother playing this when there's so much else available. I could sit and play this (multiple times, as the game seems to suggest doing) but there are so many better things out there to try instead.

On a technical level, this game is an improvement over Yakuza 1 in pretty much every way. It is genuinely incredible that they were able to make such a huge jump in quality in only a year between the two games.

The main plot of the game is kind of a mess all throughout but especially falls apart in the finale. The good bits of the story can be very good and it is compelling all the way through but I dislike the bad parts of it too much to come away from the game feeling positive about the story.

It's interesting seeing this game after having played the remake a year ago. There's an entire minigame (with its own subplot) about working as a host, the hostess management minigame is completely different, and there's even an entire third city (although it's tiny compared to Sotenbori and Kamurocho). Between the differences and how well the game holds up, I think this is genuinely still worth playing.

I don't usually play mobile games but I've been having to see doctors pretty often lately but this has helped keep my anxiety in check while I'm in waiting rooms trying not to be stressed about the disaster that is the American healthcare system.

Although since I have an older/smaller phone, it makes the bigger puzzles hard/almost impossible to do. But there's enough of the smaller size ones that I still have plenty to work through.

Pleasant lil game.